The Man Who Sold the Eiffel Tower

The case

The best-known story about Victor Lustig is also the least documented. As it is usually told, he arrived in Paris in 1925, read a newspaper piece about the cost of maintaining the Eiffel Tower, and saw an opening. Posing as a senior official of the Ministry of Posts and Telegraphs, on forged government stationery, he invited a handful of scrap-metal dealers to a confidential meeting at a grand hotel. The state, he told them, had decided to pull the tower down and sell its iron; because the decision would cause an uproar, it had to stay secret until the contract was signed.

In the classic version one dealer, named in later books as André Poisson, was eager to make his name in Paris business circles. Lustig played the corrupt functionary, hinted at his modest salary, accepted a bribe on top of the purchase money and left for Vienna. Poisson, too embarrassed to admit he had been fooled, supposedly never went to the police, and Lustig came back to try the trick again with a new group. This time, the story goes, a dealer alerted the authorities and Lustig fled to America.

No French police report, court file or contemporary Paris newspaper article describing the sale has been found by the writers who have looked. The account first appears in print in 1961, in The Man Who Sold the Eiffel Tower, a book built on the recollections of a Secret Service agent who helped catch Lustig in 1935 but witnessed nothing in Paris a decade earlier. Its dialogue is reconstructed and it gives no sources. Every later retelling, including the figure of about 70,000 francs, descends from it. The episode may be true, embroidered, or a story Lustig told about himself; the evidence does not allow a firmer answer.

What the record does establish is a long career as a confidence man on both sides of the Atlantic. Lustig, who used many names including Robert V. Miller and styled himself "Count Lustig", was arrested repeatedly in the United States in the 1920s and early 1930s. A Bureau of Investigation identification card made after his arrest in St Louis in June 1931 describes him as a fugitive confidence man wanted in several cities. He was associated with the "money box", a mahogany case that he claimed could copy banknotes given a few hours; the demonstration worked because he had loaded a genuine note in advance.

His undoing was ordinary counterfeiting. From the early 1930s Lustig worked with two men from Nebraska who made plates and printed notes while he organised their distribution. The bills spread widely enough that the Secret Service made him a priority. In May 1935 he was arrested in New York. A key in his possession led agents to a locker at the Times Square subway station holding about $51,000 in counterfeit notes and the printing plates.

On 1 September 1935, the day before his trial was due to start, he escaped from the Federal House of Detention in Manhattan by feigning illness and climbing down a rope. He was recaptured in Pittsburgh about four weeks later. He pleaded guilty to the counterfeiting charges in December 1935 and was sentenced to fifteen years, with five more for the escape.

In April 1936 Lustig was taken to Alcatraz, where he was registered as prisoner 300. He spent about a decade on the island before being moved to the federal prison hospital at Springfield, Missouri. He died there of pneumonia on 11 March 1947, under the name Robert V. Miller. The clerk who filled in his death certificate gave his usual occupation as "apprentice salesman" and counterfeiter. He was never charged with anything concerning the Eiffel Tower.